06 February 2019 2:46 PM

Your Support Still Urgently Needed for this Important, Necessary Petition

for an inquiry into the apparent link between marijuana and violence had obtained 7,800 signatures, many of them from readers of this blog. This is an excellent advance on the situation a week ago, when it fewer than 4,000. But It is nothing like enough, and I must urge all those who have vaguely thought of signing, and then put it off to another moment, to do so now, and to tell their friends about it.

10,000 signatures, now within reach, guarantee a government response of some kind (I have no idea what it will be). But to get a Parliamentary debate we need 100,000 signatures by May. This is a long way off, but possible - only if people sign, and get their friends to sign. This commits you to nothing except a search for truth. It takes less than a minute. It might one day save many lives. So please act. Now.

Comments

When the numbers of people using drugs (society is awash with legal and illegal drugs) is so high, it becomes necessary to license and regulate rather than ban them.

You need to show more than a likely link between drugs and violence, you need to show this link applies to nearly all those who take them to warrant a ban, but which is just impractical and counter-productive virtue signalling. Its effective punishments rather than bans that deter violence.

When are you going to call for an investigation into the link between reading the bible and raping? Going by the study by the American council of Bishops it multiplies the chance you will rape kids by a factor of 35, and adults by 18, this is huge, far larger than any link (that you conjured up in your quest for total ownership of the entire human race...must be linked to the bible again)

Essex Police may well support our host’s (and my) position. See Essex County Standard today - Per Adam Pipe, Essex Police’s head of roads policing. Front page. 50% more drug driving arrests than drink driving last month. Highest number in Essex ever. In a sample more than half had been arrested before in connection with serious crimes including those linked to violence. It seems there is some attention to this. Perhaps they have been reading this column. Let’s hope so.

Mr Hitchens, you may already be aware but there was an interesting article on the BBC News website 2nd February about Depersonalisation Disorder. For young people especially, smoking cannabis can be a trigger for this condition.

I image quite a few of your allies in this matter, and readers of this blog, are not British subjects, and so cannot sign the petition, however much they may wish to help (unless they were to falsify a UK postcode).

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.